Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Anathema - Not!

We were enthused that
in an age which has rediscovered matter and this earth of ours and has no place
for any flight to a world beyond, but loves the earth, cleaves to it, seeks to
taste all its preciousness, and wants to live by and for the earth, the Church
again did not respond with an anathema. Instead, she intoned a hymn to the
earth and its permanence. Once again, she spoke more magnanimously and more
forcefully of the earth’s glory than we ourselves would dare have done.

Dogma
and Preaching, 113

Reflection – OK, Catholics – what event in recent Church history is Ratzinger
referring to here? Any guesses? No?

It is the 1950 proclamation of the dogma of
the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven that is causing Ratzingerian raptures
here in this 1985 book. And it occurs to me that, with all the talk about
dialogue on this blog lately, this particular passage is very illuminating.

Parenthetically, I do have to apologize to
those readers who have been commenting on various posts. It is a bit ironic
that I have been unable to respond to comments on the subject of dialogue, and
hence unable to enter into a dialogue. It has just been a really busy time for
me, with multiple time-sensitive projects and other commitments, and all I have
been able to do for the most part is make my daily posts, which I accomplish
before 8:00 a.m. most days, and then move on to whatever work the day holds.

Anyhow. The dogma of the Assumption as an
example of the Church dialoguing with modernity. This may seem a bit odd and
angular and not quite what we normally think of as dialogue. Although, some
have argued that Mary is our deepest
response to the modern worldand its
travails.

But we see here what Ratzinger has in mind.
The world of modernity is taken up with the here and now, with the earthly,
with what is immediate and concrete and tangible. Talk of heaven and eternity
seems to lack appeal to many—at least this was definitely the case in the
mid-20th century. The optimism and worldly progress of the post-war
years spilled over into the progressivism of the 60s and 70s. Perhaps this is
changing; I certainly find lately that people are more willing to hear about
heaven in our current less hopeful scene.

But there is no question that ‘modernity’
as a movement was taken up with the goodness of this world and this life, and
the possibility of perfection and progress for this world and this life. And so
the Church elevates to the level of dogma—declares it to be part of the
ineradicable and binding deposit of faith—that Mary was assumed body and soul
into heaven.

Well, this is what you call creative
dialogue, I guess! This is the Church weighing in on the goodness of the earth,
the permanence of matter and the material order, the glory God has bestowed on
concrete tangible reality. Mary is assumed bodily into heaven. God Himself has
looked upon all that He has made and said, not only that it is very good, but
that He has made an eternal home for it in the heavenly city.

No anathemas to the worldliness of our day,
but instead showing how the ancient faith handed on in Sacred Tradition meets
that worldliness and embraces all that is good about it. And I think this is
indeed what the New Evangelization has to do along multiple lines.

Humanae Vitae, for example, was indeed the Church’s creative response to the sexual
revolution. It has been ignored, derided, unread, distorted, lied about. But
the document itself is a hymn to the goodness and dignity of human sexuality,
to the intensely meaningful nature of the sexual act, and so to its divine
ordering and structuring. Far from declaring an anathema of the sexual
revolution, the Church honors what is good and true in this social movement…
and calls it higher, to a deeper truth, a more secure goodness.

We have to be really creative and generous
here, I suggest. The call is always to see what people are really saying, what
they really want. There is a thirst for truth and goodness in every human
heart. All the great sweeping movements of society and culture, all the
ideologies and trends and belief systems have some core of truth and goodness
in them. And Christians truly immersed in the Gospel can meet this core of
truth and goodness and proclaim Christ there. Rather than condemning or mocking
people—which is all too common in our Internet culture—we should understand why
they think what they do, and propose a Gospel path to them to that same
goodness and truth.

I will always remember the strong
feminist—pro-choice, pro-gay—who came to MH and who I gave spiritual direction
to. I gave her the book Daughter Zion to read, by young Fr. Joseph
Ratzinger. It changed her life—an authentic Christian biblical feminist vision.
She is now a very strong feminist Roman Catholic (and a thoroughly wonderful
person)! That kind of thing, and Ratzinger has shown us the path of it his
entire life.

We need courage, we need generosity, we need
patience, and we need to know that the Gospel is true enough, strong enough,
and big enough to meet every aspect of secular modernity with the faith, hope,
and love of Christ.